From a Little ACORNBy: Mona Charen The Washington Times | Thursday, October 02, 2008

The financial markets teetered on the edge of an abyss last week. The
treasury secretary was literally on one knee begging the speaker of the
House not to sabotage the bailout bill.

The crash of falling banks made the Earth tremble. The Republican
presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis.
And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to
slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy
little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN is where 1960s leftovers who couldn't get tenure at
universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their
pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted
gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from
Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what
caused the mess we are in.

ACORN does many things under the umbrella of "community organizing."
They agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform,
try to unionize welfare workers (i.e., those welfare recipients obliged
to work in exchange for benefits) and organize voter registration
efforts (always for Democrats of course).

Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they
aren't especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example,
ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington state. The only trouble
was, with the exception of six, all the names submitted were fake. The
secretary of state called it the "worst case of election fraud in our
state's history." As Fox News reported:

The ACORN workers told state investigators that they went to the
Seattle public library, sat at a table and filled out the voter
registration forms. They made up names, addresses and Social Security
numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book. One worker
said it was a lot of hard work making up all those names and another
said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.

ACORN explained this was an "isolated" incident, yet similar stories
have been reported in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio and Colorado - all swing
states by the way. ACORN members have been prosecuted for voter fraud
in a number of states. (See www.rottenacorn.com) Their philosophy seems
to be that everyone deserves the right to vote, whether legal or
illegal, living or dead.

ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the
Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has
reported, ACORN proudly touted "affirmative action" lending, and
pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago
ACORN leader, boasted of "dragging banks kicking and screaming" into
dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also
found a remunerative niche as an "adviser" to banks seeking regulatory
approval.

"Thus we have J.P. Morgan and Co., the legatee of the man who once
symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American
capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to
ACORN." Is this a great country or what? As conservative community
activist Robert Woodson put it, "The same corporations that pay ransom
to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN."

ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community-organizing
days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff - the very people
who would later descend on Chicago's banks as CRA shakedown artists.
The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the
Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge, ditto. Mr. Obama was not just sympathetic - he was an ACORN
fellow traveler.

Now you could make the case that before 2008, well-intentioned
people were simply unaware of what their agitation on behalf of
noncreditworthy borrowers could lead to. But now? With the whole
financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking
like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to
fund their friends at ACORN? And, unashamed, they then trot out to the
TV cameras to declare that "the party is over" for Wall Street (Nancy
Pelosi). The party should be over for the Democrats who brought us to
this pass. If Mr. Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a
fire.

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Nancy Reagan.

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